Reaper Man

d’you mean?” there been a catastrophe or something? some kind of ten-second plague?
    “No. Don’t think so.” there’s real pressure here, you know. what’s holding everything up?
    “What do you mean?”
    shutupshutupshutup I’m trying to talk to the lady! you lot over there, keep the noise down! oh yeah? sez you —
    Mrs. Cake was aware of other voices trying to drown him out.
    “One-Man-Bucket!”
    heathen savage, am I? so you know what this heathen savage says to you? yeah? listen, I’ve been over here for a hundred years, me! I don’t have to take talk like that from someone who’s still warm! right—that does it, you …
    His voice faded.
    Mrs. Cake set her jaw.
    His voice came back.
    — oh yeah? oh yeah? well, maybe you was big when you was alive, friend, but here and now you’re just a bedsheet with holes in it! oh, so you don’t like that, eh —
    “He’s going to start fighting again, mum,” said Ludmilla, who was curled up by the kitchen stove. “He always calls people ‘friend’ just before he hits them.”
    Mrs. Cake sighed.
    “And it sounds as if he’s going to fight a lot of people,” said Ludmilla.
    “Oh, all right. Go and fetch me a vase. A cheap one, mind.”
    It is widely suspected, but not generally known , that everything has an associated spirit form which, upon its demise, exists briefly in the drafty gap between the worlds of the living and the dead. This is important.
    “No, not that one. That belonged to your granny.”
    This ghostly survival does not last for long without a consciousness to hold it together, but depending on what you have in mind it can last for just long enough.
    “That one’ll do. I never liked the pattern.”
    Mrs. Cake took an orange vase with pink peonies on it from her daughter’s paws.
    “Are you still there, One-Man-Bucket?” she said.
    — I’ll make you regret the day you ever died, you whining —
    “Catch.”
    She dropped the vase onto the stove. It smashed.
    A moment later, there was a sound from the Other Side. If a discorporate spirit had hit another discorporate spirit with the ghost of a vase, it would have sounded just like that.
    right, said the voice of One-Man-Bucket, and there’s more where that came from, okay?
    The Cakes, mother and hairy daughter, nodded at each other.
    When One-Man-Bucket spoke again, his voice dripped with smug satisfaction.
    just a bit of an altercation about seniority here, he said. just sorting out a bit of personal space. got a lot of problems here, Mrs. Cake. it’s like a waiting room —
    There was a shrill clamor of other disembodied voices.
    — could you get a message, please, to Mr.—
    —tell her there’s a bag of coins on the ledge up the chimney—
    —Agnes is not to have the silverware after what she said about our Molly—
    —I didn’t have time to feed the cat, could someone go—
    shutupshutup! That was One-Man-Bucket again. you’ve got no idea, have you? this is ghost talk, is it? feed the cat? whatever happened to “I am very happy here, and waiting for you to join me”?
    —listen, if anyone else joins us, we’ll be standing on one another’s heads—
    that’s not the point. that’s not the point, that’s all I’m saying. when you’re a spirit, there’s things you gotta say. Mrs. Cake?
    “Yes?” you got to tell someone about this.
    Mrs. Cake nodded.
    “Now you all go away,” she said. “I’m getting one of my headaches.”
    The crystal ball faded.
    “Well!” said Ludmilla.
    “I ain’t going to tell no priests,” said Mrs. Cake firmly.
    It wasn’t that Mrs. Cake wasn’t a religious woman. She was, as has already been hinted, a very religious woman indeed. There wasn’t a temple, church, mosque or small group of standing stones anywhere in the city that she hadn’t attended at one time or another, as a result of which she was more feared than an Age of Enlightenment; the mere sight of Mrs. Cake’s small fat body on the threshold was enough to stop most priests dead in the middle of their invocation.
    Dead. That was the point. All the religions had very strong views about talking to the dead. And so did Mrs. Cake. They held that it was sinful. Mrs. Cake held that it was only common courtesy.
    This usually led to a fierce ecclesiastical debate which resulted in Mrs. Cake giving the chief priest what she called “a piece of her mind.” There were so many pieces of Mrs. Cake’s mind left around the city now that it was quite surprising that